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Using technology to help remove carbon dioxide from our atmosphere has a long way to go, not only in terms of technology, but also in terms of policy. What technologies can be deployed at scale to make a difference? What rules will these efforts follow? How will these efforts be coordinated? How are we sure they won't do more harm than good, or pull resources away from other efforts to fight climate change?

As we’ve cut back on manmade aerosol emissions, this reduction is starting to cause a new spike in global temperatures since less sunlight is getting reflected back into space. We haven’t adequately accounted for this threat in our climate policy plans, which means that we’re going to overshoot our temperature goals sooner than we realize.

Today in Dubai, diplomats attending the UN’s COP28 climate policy summit approved a new global pact calling for the world’s countries to begin moving away from fossil fuels. The agreement is riddled with loopholes, doesn’t address the reality of economic development for many countries, and lacks adequate enforcement mechanisms. However, it is also an important step forward in the sense that nations are now formally on the same page now regarding what needs to be done to save our planet.

Since the mid-1990s, all of the IPCC’s projections describing how warm our planet will get assume that humans will somehow start physically removing huge amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the Earth’s atmosphere by around 2030. We're nowhere even remotely close to being able to do this technically, financially, socially or politically.